Hospital bills are confusing, frustrating and often unreasonably expensive.
Credit: iStock
A year ago, a study about U.S. hospitals marking up prices by 1,000 percent generated headlines and outrage around the country.
Twenty of those priciest hospitals are in Florida, and researchers at the University of Miami wanted to find out whether the negative publicity put pressure on the community hospitals to lower their charges. Hospitals are allowed to change their prices at any time, but many are growing more sensitive about their reputations.
What the researchers found, however, was that naming and shaming did not work. The researchers looked at the 20 hospitals’ total charges in the quarter of a year before the publicity and compared them to charges in the same quarter following the publicity. There was no evidence that the negative publicity resulted in any reduction in charges. Instead, the authors found that overall charges were significantly higher after the publicity than in previous quarters.
People queue at a free medical clinic in Wise, Virginia. Fourteen women died per 100,000 live births in the US in 2015 – a similar number to Uruguay and Lebanon.
Credit: Pete Marovich/Bloomberg
The US, the world’s biggest economy, ranks below Kazakhstan and Algeria for gender equality, according to a report showing the countries that offer the most opportunities for girls. (emphasis added)
Niger was named the worst country in the Girls’ Opportunity Index, compiled by Save the Children to mark International Day of the Girl.
The US came 32nd in the index due to its low representation of women in parliament, high teenage pregnancy rates and and its record on maternal deaths. Fourteen women died per 100,000 live births in the US in 2015, a similar […]
Navajo Reservation family in the doorway of their house.
Credit: Daily MailLOS ANGELES — Most Americans take safe water for granted: Turn the tap, and there it is. But recent protests against the Dakota Access pipeline on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota are a reminder that some Americans still worry every day about having enough clean water to survive.
As events in Standing Rock and Flint, Mich., capture national attention, long-running water emergencies fester in near-total obscurity elsewhere across the country, many of them on native reservations.
Nearly 24,000 Native American and Alaska Native households somehow manage without access to running water or basic sanitation, according to 2015 figures from the Indian Health Service, living in what my organization calls “water poverty.” About 188,000 such households were in need of some form of water and sanitation facilities improvement.
Perhaps the worst case is on the sprawling Navajo reservation in the Southwest, […]
“We just follow the consumer.”
Who decides the future of food? You do.
Speaking on a panel at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit on Tuesday, Sally Grimes, chief global growth office and president of Tyson Foods, noted that when it comes to issues like genetically modified organisms (GMOs), shoppers’ beliefs don’t always line up with the science. “So for us, we just follow the consumer,” said Grimes. “We don’t try to convince the consumer that GMOs aren’t bad.”
It’s not that she doesn’t think that the food industry has a responsibility to inform its customers, she said. “When the science is there, we share the science. But there are personal value systems that aren’t necessarily driven by scientific fact—then we’re going to follow the consumer.”
Fellow panelist Beth Ford, Land O’Lakes COO and group EVP, noted that it’s not just ingredients that matter to shoppers. “Millennials especially are making decisions about their food based on the values of the company.”
Hint water founder and CEO Kara Goldin agreed: “They want to know everything from where is the food coming from, to what are you going to do with that plastic bottle afterwards.”
So, how do you please consumers that wants […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
